For our final project, we, Julia and Sarah, worked on previously transcribed diary entries from James Merrill Linn’s 1850 diary. Using Oxygen XML editor, we were able to mark-up the diary entries with TEI. Sarah marked up the first half of the diary, while Julia marked up the second half of the diary. This was an interesting choice because in this class and HUMN 100 we focused on Linn’s diaries and letters from his time in the Civil War. There was so much to mark up in just the diaries we chose, but we decided to focus on the people. We chose to do this because in his letters and diaries about the Civil War, he did not write about many people very often.

Our work is an interesting addition to the Linn project that the whole class is working on. The majority of the project is on his time fighting in the Civil War, but we wanted to add a different aspect to it. People who look at our website need to realize that this man is not just a Civil War veteran! He grew up in Lewisburg, and graduated from Bucknell. He had a life before he fought in the Civil War. Some people may think that his life during the war was much more interesting, but his life before was intriguing as well.

We extensively marked up his diary of 1850, while also becoming more and more interested as we dug deeper into the analysis. We noticed a couple disturbing stories that Linn wrote about, including a murder of a baby. Also, Linn documented much of his social life, which was an amazing opportunity to learn more about the social life of people our age during the 1850’s. One of the recurrent themes that Linn wrote about that was similar to his Civil War diary is his meticulous attention to the weather and its documentation in the diary. Linn never fails to write about the weather happening wherever he is. Another aspect that we became more aware of was Linn’s preoccupation with other religions. We are not exactly sure what religion, if any, that Linn identifies with; however, Linn writes about his experiences at many different religious affiliations, including Methodist and Presbyterian meetings.

Blurry text showing Thursday 7thReadable text showing Wednesday 27th

Of course, subsequent “7” became easier to identify. Another aspect of the project that posed some difficulty to us was that the original transcribers failed to produce dates for the entries. After some digging up into the original documents, we were able to identify the dates for the diary entries. Shown in the image, we were originally using transcribed material that was lacking in dates and line breaks.

Space indicates where diary entry/ date started

We seemed to work really well on this project. We are both familiar with James Merrill Linn through our first DH class and each of our independent study projects. We tended to agree on the types of semantic markup that we wanted to do, and our interest level in Linn is very similar. We think that our joint markup of Linn’s 1850 diary was a success.

Every time I work on TEI, I find something new to challenge me. I worked with TEI, and, specifically, James Merrill Linn two years ago during my first year at Bucknell. As a beginner in all aspects of the digital world, I was scared by the concept of TEI. What is it? What does it do? Honestly, until now I have realized the importance of transcription and text analysis. Over two hundred years ago, there was a man from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania writing from a ship in the Atlantic back to his hometown. James Merrill Linn fought for this country, so I feel a great need respect and honor him and his work through my dedication to this project. In order to do a successful job on an assignment like this, one needs to learn correct transcription skills and semantic markup.

Smudgy handwriting

There are multiple reasons that make Linn’s letters hard to read. The first is that these letters were written in the 1860s; the language and style of writing is not so prevalent today. The second is that after over 150 years, the ink and quality of the papers starts to deteriorate. While the Bucknell archives do a great job conserving these artifacts, it naturally happens. On my particular letter, on March 5, from Linn to his father, or Papa as he calls him, there was a large section that had smudged. It was on the bottom right corner of the letter, and it was illegible to read some of the handwriting. Another thing to note is that Linn tends to use patterns in his writing, i.e., the ampersand, but I could not justify what these words were.

Something else that was very useful to us was the use of the Bucknell archives. I was able to see much more clearly his handwriting when it was in front of my own eyes rather than a computer screen. I actually loved using the magnifying glass to see his handwriting. It is amazing how Linn actually had written and touched those letters during the civil war!

After the original transcription, we marked up the text using TEI. This gives the letter some semantic meaning. People, places, events, etc. are categorized according to the critical judgments of the specific TEI editor. For example, is a ship a placeName or a objectType? I will always argue that it is a place Name, because Linn writes from it. The letters will be cited from the Cossack, which is a ship that Linn occupied during the war. He resided in this ship; therefore, I think it is a p

Linn writing from Cossack

lace. Others may not feel the same way, and they may want to mark this as a objectType; this is why TEI can create some lively discussions. It is somewhat subjective. Also, when Linn writes to his family, he tends to write differently than if he is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle. If he is writing to his father, he will talk about his well-being, while, if he is writing to his brother, he will talk about sending home guns. If Linn is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle, he seems to write more formally about events; he knows there may be a bigger audience, which may be why his writings become more objective.

Once the TEI markup was completed, we transformed it into an HTML format to be able to publish it digitally. This is a part where I struggled, because I am not as familiar with HTML as I would have liked. It was confusing to me how this worked and why it had to be done the way it was. Ultimately, I am satisfied with the end results of Module 3, because I know, or hope, James Merrill Linn would be proud.

The first part of this module is to decode Linns’ manuscript. Our group started with a very long James’ letter. In China when teaching English, we learned only Italic in class. Although personally I know some cursive, it’s still very difficult to recognize those words. For example, it’s very difficult to distinguish ‘c’, ‘u’, ‘v’, ‘e’ and ‘o’. It’s hard to tell between ‘b’ and ‘lc’ as well. Sometimes we need to combine with the context to guess what he was writing about. For the later individual part, I got a mostly transcribed letter from James’ brother John to James. Even if I was given the mostly transcribed version, I have no idea why the word is transcribed as such. It will be really interesting to sit in a library and spend all day just try to decode the letter for myself, but as an assignment it becomes a frustrating experience. I tried to get some idea from his other manuscripts, but it didn’t help much.

I love the archive experience. On screen the letter has a pale background, but when I actually looking to the piece in the archive, it’s different. It’s written on a brown/wooden piece of letter paper with lines on it. It was like my answer sheet in high school. Although I cannot fully recognize his hand writing, it’s really beautiful maybe even as an art piece. You can feel the history through the steins and the color of the paper. I think it’s easier to read for me. On the computer screen I always try to magnify the word a little bit more to try to recognized the word, but it’s not helping. In the archive I was even able to recognize a word that I had no idea before. This might be because I was reading the letter as people at that time did, which gives me a sense of the bigger picture of the letter. With a vertical screen, it’s hard to tell which part I was working on, but I can work with the digital version anytime I want though. The more I want to focus, the less information I get.

Since my part of the letter is John’s letter to James, the content is not related to what James wrote in his diary. However, when I was trying to write diaries in elementary school, I would elaborate on who is present, what time the thing is happening and what has happened since diaries are for teachers to read. If the diary is for my own, I would write things less detailed but write more about my feelings at that time. James used a lot of “we” without directly pointing out who the persons are and didn’t say much about his own feeling (it’s like I can’t feel his emotion from his words) but more about what has happened may suggest the audience of this diary might not be his future self.

For me, I’ve never heard about Linn before this mark up, and knew very little about American history. Doing those markups and transcriptions makes me feel like I was part of it, like his family or acquaintance from Lewisburg was reading the letter he wrote from the front line.